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It’s easy enough to find excuses to skip your workout during a normal week.
Add in six weeks of traveling, eating and being merry? Maintaining your fitness becomes nigh impossible.
But your body needs a good burn this month more than ever, so we hit up Luke Zocchi for the quintessential go-anywhere workout
Zocchi is famous for training Chris Hemsworth, helping him get in superhero shape for Thor and other characters, as well as other A-listers like Chris Pratt and Cate Blanchett. He’s also got an aptly titled new book called The A-List Diet & Fitness Plan in which he’s compiled his much sought-after expertise; the workout you’ll find below is an exclusive excerpt.
It’s a 20-minute, five-exercise circuit you can complete in your hotel room, in-laws’ guest bedroom or wherever the holiday season takes you.
Go ahead and bookmark it now, but before we get to the exercises, we asked Zocchi a few questions about how he came to train Hemsworth, the book and the ideal hotel-room workout gear.
RealClearLife: Why did you opt for equipment-free workouts in “The A-List”?
Luke Zocchi: There are a number of benefits for working out without equipment, but the main ones for me are that you can stay consistent with your training and you lower the risk of injuries when only using body weight.
IH: How did you become a personal trainer to Chris Hemsworth?
LZ: I actually grew up with Chris. We went to school together. After he finished Thor 2he needed to slim down and lose some muscle, and he called me up to do a six-week bootcamp with him. The six weeks went well, and I went onto the film set that Chris was prepping for. The rest is history: since then I have been with Chris for six years and completed 12 films with him.
IH: Traveling a lot for work, how often do you find yourself working out in a hotel room or other non-traditional space?
LZ: Yes, I have trained in some pretty weird places: hotel balconies, the desert in Albuquerque and even in Chris’s trailer. That’s the beauty of these body-weight workouts — you really can do them anywhere.
IH: How do you motivate yourself and others to give the same amount of dedication to workouts in a hotel room as they do in the gym?
LZ: I find that training in different locations keeps it interesting, but there is always the help of a double espresso and good music.
IH: If you’re working out in a hotel room, do you change into gym clothes?
LZ: The outfit is normally a little different in that I don’t normally wear shoes or a T-shirt, just shorts. It can get hot in a hotel room.
The Workout
Complete this five-exercise circuit four times over 20 minutes, with each exercise taking one minute. For an easy workout, work for 20 seconds, rest for 40. For average, work for 30 seconds, rest for 30. For hard, work for 40 seconds, rest for 20.
Circuits 1-3. Pages and images from The A-List published with permission from Pan Macmillan Publishers Australia. Circuits 4 & 5. Pages and images from The A-List published with permission from Pan Macmillan Publishers Australia.
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